Rancière’s Two Theses on Politics: The Disempowering

Draft, Spring 2021, WPSA Conference Tyler Olsen

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Rancière’s Two Theses on Politics: The Disempowering Dualism of Dissensus

By Tyler Olsen

Introduction

Over the past several decades, Jacques Rancière has advanced a systematic political

philosophy that takes aim at the entire tradition of political philosophy, from Plato, to Marx, to

Arendt, and beyond. One brief text in particular, his “Ten Theses on Politics,” presents his searing

critique in an unrivaled density meant to provoke his readers to reimagine the category of politics,

the relation of politics to political philosophy, and the possibilities of radical political action in the

present. I submit that these ten theses are in fact reducible to just two theses: (1) the necessity of

material inequality as the animating impulse of the dominant institutions of every social order,

i.e., the ground of Rancière’s notion of the police; and (2), the necessity of a necessarily immaterial

equality of intelligence between all human beings, i.e., the ground of what Rancière refers to as

politics, democracy, dissensus, or disagreement (these terms all being equivalent for Rancière).

These two ontological presuppositions constitute Rancière’s dualism, which, I argue has a

disempowering effect on his audience. Whereas Rancière hopes to shake his readers out of their

slumber, thus empowering them to see the world in a new way, I argue that his dualism, to the

contrary, contributes to precisely the kind of fatalism and submission to the status quo that he so

reviles.

Although I have named Rancière’s “political philosophy” and his “ontology,” in his own

meta-theoretical comments, Rancière has consistently denied that he is doing anything that could

be called political philosophy and has criticized his peers for engaging in ontology, or, as he puts

it, for “ontologizing the aporia” of the foundation of politics. Nonetheless, as I hope to

demonstrate, Rancière too plays the purportedly corrupt game of ontology; but he has good reasons


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for denying that fact: he sees such a denial as part of a project to establish an empowering

mythology or “foundational fiction” that inspires political action.

By “ontology” I simply refer to the undemonstrable presuppositions of thought that must

be posited in order to make sense of the world. As Cornelius Castoriadis puts it: “Since Plato, it

has been known that every demonstration presupposes something which is not demonstrable… the

foundational illusion has never been shared by the great philosophers: not by Plato, not by

Aristotle, not by Kant, not by Hegel” (Castoriadis, 1991: 87). Castoriadis insists that the delusion

of transcending the non-demonstrable presuppositions of thought first makes an appearance with

modern epistemology, with Cartesian doubt (and its corollary certainty) serving as the exemplar

of this delusion. From Aristotle up to the present, the study of these non-demonstrable

presuppositions has gone under the banner of metaphysics or ontology. The empiricists of modern

philosophy (and the logical positivists who would later radicalize their position) thought that they

had achieved perception of brute facts, independent of any intellectual presuppositions, and had

thus escaped from metaphysics or ontology. However, as Hegel indicates, they nonetheless must

presuppose certain categories of thought that cannot themselves be observed, such as: matter,

force, one, many, universality, motion, causality (Hegel, 1991: 79). Insofar as we limit ourselves

to mere empirical observation of physical phenomenon without resorting to any metaphysical or

ontological categories, we are reduced to Humean skepticism and must concede that the sun may

not rise tomorrow. On the other hand, like the rationalists of modern philosophy, if we deny the

possibility of perceiving anything that isn’t determined by human consciousness (e.g., Leibnez),

we are reduced to the absurd conclusion that we can never perceive anything new. The Hegelian

dialectic sought to cut through these two positions, and insisted that neither side of the dialectic

between subject (human consciousness) and object (the social totality) should be clung to one-


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sidedly. Instead, he insisted that the subject and object co-constitute each other and necessarily

exist in dialectical interpenetration.

The dualist ontology that lies behind Rancière’s foundational fiction, on my account,

amounts to the hypostatization of both sides of the Hegelian dialectic; which is to say that Rancière

clings one-sidedly to both sides of the dialectic. Pushing against Althusser’s thesis that

consciousness is necessarily interpellated by the inegalitarian logic of ideological state apparatuses

(Althusser, 2014), Rancière wants to assert the foundational equality of intelligence as intrinsic to

the human subject. Thus, Rancière’s idealism asserts the necessity of intellectual or spiritual

equality. On the flip side, despite his efforts to presuppose and assert the equality of intelligence

of those who are symbolically excluded and treated as unequal, Rancière’s materialism actually

presupposes and affirms Althusser’s claim that the Marxian superstructure has a material existence

in everyday life.

But while Althusser affirms the material existence of ideology, for him, it nonetheless

remains ideology, i.e., a fundamental distortion of the social basis of private power. For Rancière,

in contrast, the materiality of inequality is not a fundamental distortion of reality; it is instead the

necessary shape of any human society whatsoever. Indeed, the social bond, for Rancière, is

necessarily inegalitarian. Whereas Althusser ahistorically asserts the necessity of an ideological

superstructure that manifests materially in everyday life to produce a kind of habitus of inequality,

Rancière believes the lie of that superstructure, and ahistorically asserts that everyday life in social

reality is in itself (and not merely in its ideological inversion) inegalitarian by its very nature.

Rancière pushes against Althusserian interpellation in order to make space for the freedom of the

subject to be otherwise than the ideological conditioning of the objective social totality. But he

asserts the freedom of the subject at the expense of the determinism of the object.


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It is as though the empiricists and the rationalists—each of whom were criticized by Hegel

for clinging one-sidedly to opposite sides of the dialectic—were united into a single figure that

reduces reality to two contradictory claims that are each, in themselves, dogmatic. Rancière

maintains his two theses in the hopes that it generates a productive tension or dialectical

interpenetration that motivates action. The simultaneous perception that objective social

institutions are inegalitarian and that human subjects are equal should provoke radical action in

the subject. However, because Rancière’s two theses assert such an overwhelming sense of

necessity—that every social institution is inegalitarian and that equality cannot be socially

instituted—I argue that they are politically demobilizing.

Rancière’s dualism asserts the necessity of a certain conception of the subject and the

necessity of a certain conception of the object. Rather than the two sides of the dialectic, which

constitute a productive contradiction, then, Rancière’s two theses compose an immobilizing

contradiction of two mutually exclusive ontological principles, which, taken together, reify the

present and contribute to the closing off of the political imagination. Insofar as his texts have any

impact on political action at all, it is likely to discourage people who are not already engaged from

entering the political fray and claiming the rights they don’t yet have.

Plato, Post-foundationalism, and Rancière’s Foundational Fiction

Although Rancière often advances a spirited critique of Plato’s “resolute hatred of

democracy” (Rancière, 1999: 10), he occasionally expresses a genuine admiration of Plato’s

philosophical and political project. In a 2011 article, Rancière indicates that although philosophy

is the activity that “promises to tell the truth about Truth,” Plato understood that this “can only be

told as a myth,” that a “noble lie” would need to be fabricated as the foundation of any new social

order (Rancière, 2011: 15).


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If there is a privilege of philosophy, it lies in the frankness with which it tells us that

the truth about Truth is a fiction and undoes the hierarchy just as it builds it. An

egalitarian practice of philosophy, as I understand it, is a practice that enacts the aporia

of foundation, which is the necessity of a poetical act to constitute an arkhê of the

arkhê, an authority of the authority. I am aware that I am not the only person

committed to this task (Rancière, 2011: 15).

Rancière sees philosophy as an activity that attempts to poetically construct a foundational fiction

that will serve as the contingently instituted myth at the ground of the social order. He admires

Plato’s frankness in acknowledging this fact through the image of the noble lie. He is committed

to the project of enacting his own foundation fiction; but rather than constructing any old mythos,

Rancière aims to construct one that would enact the aporia of foundation, thus making the poetic,

contingent, fictional status of the foundation visible in the very act of founding it. This kind of

foundational fiction would undo hierarchy while simultaneously establishing it. Finally, Rancière

acknowledges the fact that within the philosophical battlefield of competing foundational attempts,

he is not the only person committed to the task of laying a foundational fiction that simultaneously

establishes hierarchy and breaks it down. That is to say, there are other post-foundational

philosophers working towards this very same objective.

By “post-foundational,” I simply refer to the philosophical perspective that posits the

ungroundable status of social reality, and thus the impossibility of identifying or establishing a

final or natural foundation for knowledges, social practices, or institutions of state and society.

Moving beyond forms of thought that attribute a permanent essence to the human being or to

human society, and beyond those that posit some kind of “cunning” or telos to history, post-

foundational theory asserts the historical contingency of any given regime of power/knowledge

(Foucault, 1970); its lack of rootedness in an unchanging nature, a teleological schema, a divine

revelation, or any sort of essentialist foundation whatsoever. Nonetheless, there is a kind of

foundation in any given time and place: in any society there is a foundational horizon of


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intelligibility, empirically embedded in social practices, institutions, and imaginaries, which serves

both to constrain and to open up the possibilities of social life, and which is contingently instituted

and subject to transformation. Rancière, who shares in this post-foundational perspective, admires

Plato for anticipating this 20th century philosophical insight over 2000 years ago.

In The Philosopher and His Poor (1983), we again encounter Rancière’s account of Plato’s

“extraordinary frankness” in expressing the necessity of establishing both knowledge and social

order on a foundational fiction rather than on the firm soil of some sort of knowledge of society,

science of science, or truth of Truth (Rancière, 2004: 52). This frankness distinguishes Plato from

later thinkers (e.g., Marx, Althusser, Bourdieu) who will obscure the necessity of a foundational

fiction in their attempts to found a genuine (i.e., non-poetic) science of society or foundation of

knowledge. Embedded in the image of the noble lie, Plato’s extraordinary frankness expresses “the

paradox of [philosophy’s] very institution” (Rancière, 2004: 52). That is to say: despite its apparent

concern with the truth of Truth, despite its claim that it is distinct from both the technical

knowledge of the artisans and the poetic creation of the playwrights, philosophy—along with the

mythical tales it spins—is only established as legitimate through those very myths. Philosophy’s

legitimacy is enacted through the images, narratives, metaphors, and stories that it furnishes for

itself. Once philosophy is established as legitimate, it produces the appearance of truth. First comes

legitimacy, through fiction; then comes truth, through the effects of that fiction on the social order.

The technical knowledge of the artisans, on the other hand, is legitimate only insofar as it is able

to consistently produce some material good for human civilization. That is to say, technical

knowledge is legitimated by its effects, whereas philosophy is legitimated by its fictions; but it

produces determinate truth effects insofar as it is established as legitimate.


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Plato’s project, then, consists in the effort to create a specific truth effect in the sphere of

appearances; in the sphere of the doxa (prevailing public opinion) within which all politics and all

human life necessarily unfold. Rancière thus insists that Plato is not primarily concerned with the

imposition of his truth or with the establishment of an inegalitarian order. Instead, he aims to create

a specific effect. Plato hopes that his foundational fiction will be “the fiction that chases the artisan

from the realm of fiction… Its concern is less to lock others up than to protect itself from them,

less to impose its truth than to safeguard its appearance. Nobility, we know, consists of that first

and foremost” (Rancière, 2004: 52). On Rancière’s account, Plato seeks to police the sphere of

appearance, to ensure that the overly passionate rabble rousers of the democratic assembly are not

able to constitute foundational fictions that will end up structuring the configuration of the

prevailing appearances in the sphere of doxa. Plato seeks, in short, to create an aristocracy of

appearances, to preserve the capacity of configuring the space of sensible reality for the clear-

headed philosophical elite. To do this, he must establish the rigid division between philosophy on

the one hand, and fiction, poetry, technical knowledge, and political rhetoric on the other. Thus

the eminently rational philosophers, unmoved by the turbulence of the moment, will reserve for

themselves the right to poetically produce the foundational fictions that have the effect of

instituting certain form-giving principles that give shape to the social order.

While Rancière often charges Plato with the will to establish an inegalitarian, aristocratic

social order that corrects the excesses of oligarchy without resorting to democracy, here we see

that he charges Plato with something else entirely: Plato aims to police the domain of poetics so

as to ensure that he and his cadre of philosophers possess a monopoly on the production of the

foundational fictions that lay at the basis of all appearances. Though the effect of his policing of

the realm of fiction may well be to bring about an inegalitarian social order, his principal aim is,


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on this account, to police the realm of fiction. The construction of foundational myths “must be

reserved” for the enlightened philosophers (Rancière, 2004: 17).

Perceiving a destructive dynamic in the interaction between the rich and the poor in the

democratic assembly, Plato aimed to correct the problem through his foundational myth. This

noble lie aimed to disqualify both the oligarchs and the democrats, both the rich and the poor, from

the ability to contribute to the symbolic constitution of the social, thereby privileging the

philosophers as uniquely qualified in this task. On this reading, Plato hoped to bring some stability

to the realm of appearances through his philosophical interventions.

Rancière perceives Plato’s myth-making strategy as adding a third party—the

philosopher—to the troubling relation between the oligarchs and the democrats. Rancière traces

the pernicious legacy of this strategy as follows: (1) the oligarchs tend to dominate the capacity

to construct the symbolic constitution of the social through their foundational fictions, whether the

“nobility” of pre-Cleisthenic Athens or the “meritocracy” of the present; (2) the philosophers, with

their distinctions between high and low, only tend to reinforce the reigning authority structure,

with its divisions between nobles or experts on the one hand, and commoners or deplorables on

the other; and (3) the common people, the rabble-rousers, the riff-raff, the working poor, the

immigrants without papers, the mad, the sexual deviants—in short the demos of any given time or

place—tend to be excluded from the privilege of contributing to the symbolic constitution of the

social by way of the dynamic at work in the interplay between the power of the oligarchs and the

legitimating myths offered by all stripes of philosophers, social scientists, sociologists, and

otherwise academically distinguished elites. Plato, like Marx, Althusser, and Bourdieu, meant

well. They intended to undercut the strength of the oligarchs. But in reserving for the intellectuals

the privilege of symbolically constituting the space of social reality, they excluded the masses from


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this project and unwittingly provided the intellectual support needed by an economic elite intent

on securing their material privilege in the social hierarchy.

Rancière sets out to undermine the project of all these intellectuals. But he does so by

“paradoxically” attempting to lay his own foundational myth or fiction. It would have to be a

fiction that both undermines the legitimacy of intellectuals to construct such fictions and that

undermines the reigning fiction that is operative in the oligarchic structure of social reality. Thus,

in a reversal of what he takes to be Plato’s objective of chasing out the common artisans, farmers,

and working poor, Rancière seems to gesture towards their inclusion. He sees his practice of

philosophy as “an-archical” and “egalitarian,” which means that he wants to lay a foundation that

“undoes the hierarchy just as it builds it” (Rancière, 2004: 14-15). That is to say, Rancière believes

that his (post)foundational fiction would empower the demos to contribute to such fictional

projects, and thereby to undermine the concrete institutional dominance of the oligarchs. It is

through their access to participation in the symbolic constitution the realm of doxa—of

appearances, of the prevailing public opinion, of the symbolic constitution of the social—that the

demos will be able to fight the formally institutionalized oppression that they face at the hands of

the oligarchs.

Given this general picture of Rancière’s project, it is important to keep in mind what

Rancière refers to as the “polemical context” in which he has written his works. In the first of his

Ten Theses, Rancière insists that his articulation of the specificity of politics

must be distinguished carefully from the current and widespread propositions

regarding the return of the political. The context of state consensus that has developed

since the 1990s has brought with it a profusion of affirmations proclaiming the end of

the illusion of the social and a return to a ‘pure’ form of politics… In practice, this

celebration of pure politics relinquishes the virtue associated with the political good,

handing it over to governmental oligarchies enlightened by their experts (Rancière,

2010: 35-36).


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Often drawing on Leo Strauss or Hannah Arendt’s image of the Greek polis, Rancière contends,

many theorists of “the political” tended to emphasize the opposition between the purity of “the

political sphere of public action and speech and the realm of economical and social necessity”

(Rancière, 2011: 3). Despite the fact that such theories were offered as ideals against which to

criticize the present, Rancière insists that they played right into the hands of a neoliberal rationality

that was being marshalled to depoliticize economic, domestic, and social injustices by pushing

them to the “private” side of the public-private frontier, leaving the “public” bureaucracies and

institutions of the neoliberal state—dominated by various experts and their technical knowledge—

as the only places in which politics legitimately occurs. Rancière argued that political

philosophy—even the radical leftist versions rooted in the post-foundational perspective—was

unwittingly bolstering the neoliberal consensus at the so-called end of history. It is this perceived

conjunction of the project of neoliberalism and the project of political philosophy that constitutes

what Rancière refers to as the “polemical context of [his] argumentation” (Rancière, 2011: 2).

The set of technical knowledges that constitute the contemporary neoliberal consensus rest

on a particular foundational fiction that is specific to modern societies. This fiction asserts: (1) the

ultimate authority of scientific knowledge as against the ignorance of unscientific opinions; and

(2) the reality of the meritocracy, wherein the technically most adept or qualified rise to the top of

the technocracy. Two of the specific truth effects created by this fiction are the institutional

construction of material inequality and the intellectual belief in its truth, necessity, and justice. The

faith in science and meritocracy has structured the hierarchies of authority and decision-making

procedures throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, thereby reserving for the experts

the right to make decisions, and subjecting the non-experts to the mercy of the expert knowledge

systems and decision-making procedures that embody the prevailing scientific consensus. While


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there was once a Keynesian technocratic consensus that benefitted from this foundational edifice,

as the Western social order encountered a determinate crisis in the 1970s, one technocratic content

was easily replaced with another, that of neoliberal rationality.

Rather than remaining at the level of appearances or “truth effects” (i.e., inequality),

Rancière seeks to undermine the foundational fiction that undergirds the technical knowledge of

the neoliberal consensus through the consolidation of a new foundational fiction. Thus, the purpose

of Rancière’s two theses on politics is as follows. The equality thesis would undermine the

technocratic faith in experts, while simultaneously empowering the non-experts. The oligarchy

thesis would undermine the faith in meritocracy and enlist the passion of egalitarian action against

the inegalitarian neoliberal consensus of the contemporary police order. This, in any case, seems

to be Rancière’s strategy—Rancière’s philosophical ambition.

Many of the political theorists that can be described as post-foundationalists (e.g. Claude

Lefort, Étienne Balibar, Cornelius Castoriadis, Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Alain Badiou)

assert the necessity of social conflict in any given time or place. Thus, although there is no

necessary or natural ground to social reality, and every ground is a contingent, poetic achievement,

there is something constant, namely social conflict. Drawing on readings of Aristotle, Machiavelli,

or Marx, these thinkers see social relations as necessarily structured by a central division between

the weak and the powerful. Thus, despite their refusal to assert a strong ontological claim in the

form of a necessary or natural ground to the social, they do assert a weak ontological claim by

asserting that any social order is necessarily structured by conflict. Rancière too sees social

relations as necessarily antagonistic, as necessarily resting on conflict or division; but he gives this

picture his own unique spin, which constitutes his dualism. Rather than focusing on the idea that

social conflict is necessary (and perhaps thinking about what sorts of institutions would give the


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poor, oppressed, and excluded the upper hand), Rancière abstracts a principle, presupposition, or

“logic” from each side of the social conflict and hypostatizes each one.

On the one hand, there is the principle or “logic” of inequality, which serves as the

necessary foundation of any and every social order in its materiality; this is the logic of hierarchies,

institutions, and authority structures. This is the presupposition of the wealthy and powerful, who

dominate the social hierarchy of any and every society. This is the logic of Rancière’s “police

order.” On the other hand, we have the principle or “logic” of equality, which is the universal

equality of the logos, and serves as the animus or presupposition for all instances of political action

that seek to disrupt and transform the inequality embedded in the material institutions of society.

This is the equality of any speaking being with any other, and is necessarily an immaterial,

spiritual, or “intellectual” equality. This is the presupposition of the weak and disadvantaged, who

seek to claim the rights that they do not have.

But, for Rancière, this universal equality of intelligence also serves as a necessary ground

of the inegalitarian social hierarchies insofar as it must be presupposed in order to explain to the

oppressed why they deserve their diminished lot in life. Whether such inegalitarian social relations

are justified by appeal to the divine right of kings or to the idea of the meritocracy and the reign

of scientific knowledge, the inegalitarian explanation that justifies hierarchy must presuppose the

equality of the oppressed and excluded in their capacity to comprehend the foundational fiction

that justifies their position in the police order. Thus, despite the necessarily oligarchical and

inegalitarian materiality of any possible society, every social order is simultaneously constituted

by the immaterial equality of intelligence, without which inequality itself would be impossible.

This is the core of Rancière’s foundational fiction.


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Rancière’s Dualism: The Universal Equality of the Logos

Rancière describes the “equality of anyone at all with anyone else” (1999: 15) as “the

ultimate equality on which any social order rests” (1999: 16), suggesting that it plays the role of a

ontological foundation that persists in every possible social order. He variously refers to this form

of equality as: the “original equality of the logos” (1999: 18); “the equality of any speaking being

with any other speaking being” (1999: 30); the “apolitical structural vacuum of equality between

anyone and everyone” (1999: 34); the “equality of intelligence, the absolute condition of all

communication and any social order” (1999: 34, emphasis added); and “the equality of

intelligence… the common bond of humankind, the necessary and sufficient condition for a society

of men to exist” (Rancière, 1991: 73, emphasis added). This foundational equality of intelligence

is not contingent upon some politically instituted social order. To the contrary, Rancière specifies

it as a necessary component of every possible social order.

Rancière insists that his originary equality of the logos was the form of equality effective

in the political activity of the Athenian democracy (Rancière, 1999: 15-16). This equality “takes

effect as” the freedom of the demos; the freedom of the demos “presents philosophy with… the

effect of” this equality (1999: 18, 15). According to Rancière, his transcendental equality causes

freedom, and in fact appears concretely as freedom and thus is freedom. He puts it differently,

generalizing from his account of Athenian history to his understanding of politics as such:

Politics occurs because, or when, the natural order of the shepherd kings, the warlords,

or property owners is interrupted by a freedom that crops up and makes real the

ultimate equality on which any social order rests (1999: 16)

Freedom “makes real” Rancière’s equality of intelligence, which begins to sound like an

ontological substance that makes its empirical appearance in the form of political freedom. This

notion of politics points to those situations in which this ultimate equality is made real by the free


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action of singular assemblages of people. In such instances, equality functions as a presupposition

of action that people assume as a starting point rather than positing as a goal. When it makes a

concrete appearance (in political activity and as freedom), this presupposition of equality “itself

demonstrates the sheer contingency of the order, the equality of any speaking being with any other

speaking being” (1999: 30). For Rancière, insofar as equality is presupposed by political actors

and put into action, it has the effect of exposing the contingency of the social order despite the

latter’s claim to (or appearance as) necessity or nature.

In addition to arguing that the presupposition or enactment of the universal equality of

intelligence has the effect of exposing or demonstrating the necessary contingency of the social

order, Rancière also, strangely, identifies this equality with the notion of the contingency itself:

This equality is simply the equality of anyone at all with anyone else: in other words,

in the final analysis, the absence of arkhê¸ the sheer contingency of any social order

(Rancière, 1999: 15).

Here we see that Rancière’s universal equality is identified with “the absence of arkhê,” which is

described as “the sheer contingency of any social order.” This identification of equality and

contingency has caused some confusion for many theorists who have commented on Rancière’s

thought.1 But a clue as to Rancière’s understanding of the relation between equality and

contingency comes in the 2011 article I cited above. Comparing his philosophical activity to

dissensus—which he insists is not only the object of his writing but also its method—Rancière says

that in his work he attempts to disclose “the contingency or the poetic character of any arkhê”

(Rancière, 2011: 15). In this passage Rancière substitutes the notion of contingency with the notion

of poetic. A contingent arkhê is simply a poetic arkhê. His meaning of “poetic” is clarified through

his discussion of what he calls a “poetics of knowledge.”

1 For instance, see Oliver Marchart (2011: 136-137) and Jody Dean (2011: 87-89).


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A poetics of knowledge can be viewed as a kind of ‘deconstructive practice’, to the

extent that it tries to trace back an established knowledge—history, political science,

sociology, and so on—to the poetic operations—description, narration,

metaphorization, symbolization, and so on—that make its objects appear and give

sense and relevance to its propositions. What is important to me is that this ‘reduction’

of scientific discourse to the poetical moment means its reduction to the equality of

speaking beings (Rancière, 2011: 14).

All forms of authoritative or scientific knowledge, upon which social hierarchies are founded, were

constructed through a series of narratives and discourses that managed to be presented as science,

as tradition, or as otherwise true. Instead of being perceived as contingently constructed and

politically instituted as truth, such knowledges end up appearing as necessary truths and function

as taken for granted presuppositions. The purpose of a poetics of knowledge is to reveal the

contingent linguistic or literary origins of those knowledges and to reveal the processes through

which they were able to transcend that status. As Rancière puts it in his introduction to The Names

of History, a poetics of knowledge is “a study of the set of literary procedures by which a discourse

escapes literature, gives itself the status of a science, and signifies this status” (Rancière, 1994: 8).

The contingent, literary origin of a knowledge that is regarded as scientific or otherwise as true

would be exposed in Rancière’s “deconstructive practice.” Contingency, for Rancière, points to

the constitutive linguistic element of all knowledge and authority. If authority rests upon

knowledge or tradition, and both knowledge and tradition rest upon the poetic operations of

language, then the necessary ground of any society is language. But there is no necessary relation

between words, the meanings that are attached to those words, and the objects or referents to which

those words point. This ultimate contingency of the relation between words, concepts, and things

is the very contingency that underlies every social order for Rancière.

Throughout The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) Rancière riffs on this connection between

the contingency of the social order and the contingency of the relation between words, concepts,


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and things under the banner of “arbitrary” (see especially pp 58-71, and 78). In On the Shores of

Politics (1995), he concisely explains the implications of this observation for his account of

political life in a small section titled “Community and Society: The Paradox of Equality.” (80-84).

Language, in itself, is devoid of meaning or sense: it is arbitrary. Thus, the person who speaks and

the person who listens must “invest [the words] with meaning at each use” (Rancière, 1995: 81).

In each speech act, participants must actively construct the meaning of the words from out of the

context of an entire life of experience and an entire world of significant interrelations between

words, things, memories, projects, etc. The meanings of words do not inhere in the signs

themselves. It is only insofar as every speech act is a hermeneutic appropriation—both on the part

of the speaker and on the part of the listener—that meaning can be shared and communication can

occur. For Rancière, this pragmatics of communication has two implications: (1) every speech act

assumes an interlocutor whose intellectual agency must actively construct the meaning of the

words, a meaning which cannot be deduced from a “pre-existing code or dictionary”; and (2), there

is only one way to be “intelligent” (Rancière, 1995: 81-82). Thus all discourses of authority—

which are contingently/poetically constructed and constituted as truth—are always contingently

re-constructed each time they are comprehended as legitimate. Each act of re-construction implies

the activity of an intelligence that is equal to any other, and which is capable of re-constructing

those discourses of authority in a new way. It is through the linguistic capacity of human beings

that meaning, knowledge, authority, power, and hierarchies are constituted. It is also through this

linguistic capacity that humans are able to appropriate the reigning meanings of social relations

and to put those significations to new uses.

Both contingency and equality are tied together with the poetic or linguistic operations at

the basis of every act of communication, every form of knowledge, and every social hierarchy or


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power structure. Because authority rests upon a chain of modifiable poetic constructs, it is always

possible that the linguistic chains upon which authority rests could be unraveled by political action

that enacts the originary equality of the logos and transforms the meaning of words, thereby

undermining authority and asserting human freedom. Such action reveals the contingency of a

given authority by demonstrating the contingency of the meaning of the discourse that grounds

that authority; by showing, for instance, that “right” could signify newly, could be used as a

democratic justification for the power of the people rather than a divine justification for the power

of the king. This is what Rancière means when he describes political activity as “whatever shifts a

body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination” (Rancière, 1999: 30). Political

action brings into play the meaning of authoritative discourses, thus reconfiguring the relations

between words and things, between knowledge and authority, between discourses that keep bodies

in their place and the variable designations and destinations of those places and/or bodies. Such

egalitarian reconfigurations make the contingent/poetic foundations of authority explicit as such

and reconfigure certain linguistic chains that ground authority, thereby shifting the configuration

of roles, places, bodies, and ways of thinking, acting, and being in the world.

The equality of intelligence, for Rancière, is a necessary, ontological structure of human

coexistence; but that originary equality has no necessary form of appearance. Thus, as the “sole

principle” of politics, equality “is not peculiar to it [politics] and is in no way in itself political. All

equality does is lend politics reality in the form of specific cases to inscribe, in the form of

litigation, confirmation of the equality at the heart of the police order” (Rancière, 1999: 31-32).

Insofar as structures of power go unchallenged and are left to signify their poetic foundations as

though they were authoritative, the equal capacity of speaking beings reconstructs the authoritative

discourses unchanged, and the hermeneutic appropriation of meaning only reproduces the truth of


18

the social hierarchies, instilling a belief in their necessity. In this case, the ontological equality of

the logos makes its empirical appearance as subservience. But when political actors

hermeneutically appropriate the authoritative linguistic chains in disruptive ways that unsettle

habituated patterns of thought and action, thereby revealing the poetic/contingent character of the

reigning power structure, then Rancière’s ontological equality makes its empirical appearance as

freedom.

If there is a necessary place for a contingent ground of any social order, for Rancière that

sheerly contingent ground is necessarily the poetic operations of language that establish a set of

discourses as a foundational fiction. That foundational fiction, established as true, and as an

ordering-legitimating horizon of intelligibility for the organization of social hierarchies, privileges,

and authority structures, is itself only possible on the basis of a capacity for language or

intelligence that is equally distributed among human beings. Despite Rancière’s apparent

identification of equality with contingency, in the theoretical moves that he makes in the

construction of his theory of politics, he does not in fact identify the two concepts. Rather, he

derives both equality and contingency from the logos, the ultimate foundation of all contingent

foundations and of all egalitarian political action that disrupts those foundations.

Rancière’s Dualism: The Iron Law of Oligarchy

Rancière illustrates the link between his two theses, on the one hand, and the originary

conflict of the social, on the other, through an examination of Aristotle’s famous characterization

of the human being as the creature that possesses logos—that is, the capacity to give an account,

to speak, to deliberate, to reason. The human animal is essentially an animal with language. But

Rancière notes that Aristotle is not satisfied with this simple generic definition, instead choosing

to enumerate species of the genus: whereas the developed adult male has full possession and


19

authority of the logos, “the slave is the one who participates in reason [logos] so far as to recognize

it (aisthêsis) but not so as to possess it (hexis)” (Rancière, 1999: 17). Right inside the essential

definition of the human being, which would seem to include all human beings, there is already an

exclusion at work in the Aristotelian text. While all human beings have the capacity to understand

and to give an account, Aristotle’s exclusion of the slave (as well as the woman and the child)

from full humanity is achieved by the account that is made of their capacity to give an account.

The universality of the logos is split from within.

For Rancière, this exclusion lies at the heart of all police orders, whose modus operandi is

to police bodies into their place by excluding them from the right to assert their equality in speech.

Political action thematizes this “fundamental conflict”—between those who claim the right to

command and those who are forced to submit—by naming it (Rancière, 1999: 22). Rancière writes:

“the people” is the name, the form of subjectification, of this immemorial and

perennial wrong through which the social order is symbolized by dooming the

majority of speaking beings to the night of silence or to the animal noise of voices

expressing pleasure or pain (Rancière, 1999: 22).

From out of the originary structure of the logos, then, there are two necessary “processes”

(Rancière, 1999: 30, 34) or “logics” (Rancière, 1999: 28, 32-33) at work, which are set against

each other in an interminable conflict. On the one hand, there is the poetic invention of an

inegalitarian fiction (the account made of the capacity to give an account) that establishes the

legitimacy of some hierarchical structure of society to the exclusion of some and the privilege of

others. On the other hand, there is the simple fact that all humans have equal access to the logos

despite the inegalitarian fiction that justifies exclusion.

While this logos-centric elaboration of the conflictual ground of the social is indeed a

unique spin on the post-foundational perspective, there is one element that is a positive deviation

from the comments of other post-foundationalist theorists: Rancière insists that the logic of


20

inequality will always be the animating principle of the dominant institutions of every society.

Whereas Lefort, Mouffe, Laclau, Balibar, and others insist that every society is marked by a

fundamental antagonism, but leave the shape of that antagonism undetermined, Rancière insists

that the wealthy and powerful necessarily dominate. The material reality of inequality comes up

against the spiritual, intellectual, or immaterial reality of equality, thus providing a dynamic in

which the oppressed must perpetually struggle against a social system that is destined to oppress

them. True, he does indicate that “[t]here is a worse and a better police,” and that “[o]ur situation

is in every way preferable to that of the Scythian slaves,” who had their eyes gouged out to prevent

them from escaping their bondage (Rancière, 1999: 30). Nonetheless, empirical improvements

aside, Rancière excludes the possibility that any police order might be predominantly animated by

an egalitarian impulse. Rancière believes that there will always be a conflict between the wealthy

and the poor, and that the wealthy will always be on top.

Echoing Robert Michel’s (1911) notion of the “iron law of oligarchy”—which insists upon

the necessity of oligarchic rule in any complex society requiring organizations for its functioning,

whether nominally referred to as a “democracy” or not—Rancière articulates his foundational

“logic” of inequality in a variety of manners. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1991) he refers to the

“law of gravity” (76-80), which requires that “all bodies mindlessly hurl toward the center” (76).

Just as stones hurl towards the center of the earth so too does the material of human bodies hurl

mindlessly towards a centralizing power-structure that puts each body in its place, assigning it a

corresponding role and way of being/thinking/doing. In Hatred of Democracy he puts it

differently: he insists that there is a “natural order” in the world, wherein societies tend towards

rule by a wealthy elite, who, in turn, utilize force and scientific knowledge in the consolidation of

their privileged status (Rancière, 2014: 46). They are thereby able to establish a certain


21

“distribution of places and capabilities” that configures the institutions, roles, aptitudes, and ways

of life available to the population (Rancière, 2014: 47). While these oligarchic forms of governance

are politically instituted, contingent achievements, and thus only appear to be natural, Rancière is

quite consistent in insisting upon the necessary place of some contingently instituted oligarchic

order or another. In Disagreement (1999), he refers to any such structure of sensible reality as “the

police” (28-29), and insists that “the resistance of any police order” to democratic politics “is a

matter of principle” (39). That is to say: there is no such thing as a police order that does not

intrinsically work against democratic politics in its very concept. Every police order, for Rancière,

necessarily tends towards oligarchy and domination. Representative government is just one way

in which this oligarchic police principle has been institutionalized (Rancière, 2014: 53). How

oligarchy is institutionalized varies. But the fact that it is institutionalized does not. With this

hypostatization of the iron law of oligarchy Rancière rules out in advance the possibility of a social

order that is not predominantly animated by an oligarchic impulse, closing out the possibilities of

institutional transformation in troubling ways.

But while the wealthy necessarily dominate, they must invent some fiction that justifies

their privileged position and explains to the dominated the necessity of the arrangement of social

relations, perhaps appealing to nature, nobility, divinity, or the telos of history. In this poetic act

of providing a foundation to the contingently instituted authority structure, they must pragmatically

presuppose the equality of intelligence of those persons whom the poetic fiction categorizes as

inferior.2 In order for these supposed inferiors to understand the poetic fiction that justifies the

authority structure, they must have the equal linguistic capacity to make sense of the words used

in the foundational fiction. “Equality must be posited if inequality is to be explained” (Rancière,

2 See Rancière’s example of the plebeian secession to the Aventine Hill in On the Shores of Politics (1995: 69, 82, 85)

and Disagreement (1999: 23-27, 33).


22

1995: 82). Thus the inequality of the social order is ultimately grounded in the equality of

intelligence implied in the structure of the logos. But the converse is also true, on Rancière’s

account:

What binds us together prior to all community, prior to any equality of intelligence,

is the link that runs through all those points where the weight of things in us

becomes consent, all those points where acquiescence comes to be loved as

inequality and is reflected in the activities of comparing, setting up and explaining

ranks… The social bond is maintained by this endless manufacture of acquiescence,

which in schools is called explanation and in public assemblies and courts goes by

the name of persuasion (Rancière, 1995: 83).

The condition of possibility for linguistic interaction (and its necessary equality of intelligence) is

the material existence of a society. Language does not occur in isolation from the social bond,

which, on Rancière’s account, is necessarily inegalitarian, and necessarily bound up with an

inegalitarian fiction. Thus, prior to the equality of intelligence, we are held together by the

discourse of inequality, which itself presupposes the equality of intelligence.

This difficult relation between language, equality, and inequality is what Rancière refers

to as the “paradox of equality” (1995: 80-84), which serves as the foundation for his vision of

politics. But this “paradox” is precisely not the dialectical penetration of the subject and the object.

To the contrary, Rancière insists that we must either cling to one side or to the other. Indeed, there

are “but two ways of grasping hold of arbitrariness, the primary non-reason of things and of

language: the egalitarian reason of the community of equals or the inegalitarian unreason of social

bodies” (1995: 84). The community of equals gestures towards Rancière’s notion of dissensus,

which: (1) does not set equality as a goal, but instead presupposes it as a starting point; and (2)

acknowledges that “the community of equals can never achieve substantial form as a social

institution” (Rancière, 1995: 85). This elusive community of equals indicates people who have

perceived the inegalitarian fiction for what it is, and have interpreted it differently, have

appropriated the words that bind the social order together and deployed them in ways that


23

undermine the social bond. But as soon as they attempt to give equality some substantial form in

concrete institutions of society and to create a new fiction of their own—one that would justify

equality rather than inequality—Rancière insists that they necessarily betray their own cause.

No matter how many individuals become emancipated, society can never be

emancipated. Equality may be the law of the community, but society inevitably

remains in thrall to inequality… A community of equals can never become

coextensive with a society of the unequal, but nor can either exist without the other.

They are as mutually exclusive in their principles as they are mutually reinforcing

in their existence (Rancière, 1995: 84).

Rancière’s dualistic ontology comes down to the necessity of both material inequality (of the

social bond) and immaterial equality (of intelligence).

In light of this ontology, Rancière’s seemingly “paradoxical” formulation of the political

subject makes much more sense. Consider the formulation he provides in his attack on Hannah

Arendt: “the Rights of Man are the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have

the rights that they have not” (Rancière, 2010: 75). This statement is merely a reassertion of the

dual reality of both equality and inequality. The person who does not have the rights that they

have points to the material reality of the unequal distribution of social bodies, the merely formal

rights that are not actualized in the necessarily oligarchic social order. The person who has the

rights that they do not have points to the immaterial reality of the equality between speaking

beings, the equality between anyone and everyone that is presupposed and enacted in the face of

that unequal social reality.

Is Another World Possible?

An important question here would be: how do we transform the durable, material

institutions of the police order along egalitarian lines. Unfortunately, Rancière exhibits uninhibited

contempt towards any speculation as to how contemporary institutions of governance might be

reformed along more egalitarian lines. For instance, he describes participatory democratic theory


24

as a “mongrel idea” caught in the tension between reform and revolution—an idea that assigns “to

enduring democracy, as its site of exercise, the mere filling of spaces left empty by power”

(Rancière, 1995: 60). Against this “mongrel idea” of “enduring democracy,” Rancière suggests

that the real “permanence” of democracy lies in its “mobility, its capacity to shift the sites and

forms of participation” (1995: 60). That is to say, democracy is only permanent insofar as it is not

permanent, insofar as it is not hemmed in by institutional forms that fix it to a place, a role, and a

mode of practice.

But such institutionalization of democracy in the police order is precisely what was

achieved in Rancière’s paradigmatic instances of politics in Athens and Rome. Theorists and

practitioners of participatory democracy rightly look to these ancient exemplars for inspiration in

imagining new political institutions. But given Rancière’s nomenclature, this “mongrel idea” of

participatory democracy would merely refer to a better police order, one that seeks to fix some

forms and sites of democratic participation. Any talk of positively transforming the institutions of

governance is discounted from the outset as mere policing. But why should we let differences in

word choice block an entire field of research from view? Call it a mongrel idea, call it the police,

call it whatever you like; just because it does not count as what Rancière refers to as “politics”

does not mean that we should so disdainfully dismiss such alternative institutional possibilities out

of hand. Participatory democratic theory,3 participatory economics,4 participatory budgeting,5

practices of worker self-management,6 alternative forms of property law and resource

3 Carol Pateman (1970), C.B. Macpherson (1977), Archon Fung & Erik Olin Wright (2003), Boaventura de Sousa

Santos (2005), Gianpaolo Baiocchi & Ernesto Ganuza (2016), Michael Menser (2018).

4 Michael Albert & Robin Hahnel (1991), Michael Albert (2004), Robin Hahnel (2013).

5 Rebecca Neara Abers (2000), Gianpaolo Baiocchi (2005), Benjamin Goldfrank & Aaron Schneider (2006), Brian

Wampler (2010, 2015), Luis Armando Gandin (2011).

6 Francisco Javier Forcadell (2005), David Schweickart (2002).


25

management,7 institutions of democratic confederalism,8 and movements for food sovereignty and

agrarian reform9 are possible ways of thinking about transforming the institutional structures and

everyday practices of governance (or “policing”, if you prefer). There are myriad other possibilities

not mentioned here. But a true adherent to Rancière’s theoretical framework would refuse to

consider such institutional trajectories, such “mongrel ideas.” Once you start talking about

institutions, you are already talking about police, which is identified as necessarily oligarchical.

For Rancière, the question of institutions is off the table.

Consider his discussion of an 1833 strike by the tailors of Paris. One component of the

strike was the creation of a workshop that was managed by the workers themselves. But, according

to Rancière, this should be taken “less as a germ of some ‘workers’ power’ to come than as an

extension of the republican principle to a realm still foreign to it, namely the workshop. Perhaps

after all there is no need for the workers to own their own factory and run it themselves in order to

be equal. Perhaps it is enough for them to show, when appropriate, that they can do so” (Rancière,

1995: 49). Rancière goes on to insist that this instance of worker self-management should be seen

merely as a temporary demonstration of a “capacity” rather than as the foundation of some sort of

“counterpower susceptible of governing a future society” (ibid.). While Rancière exhibits a

suspicion towards the possibility of the institutionalization of worker self-management and worker

ownership of the workplace, he displays an admiration for the prospect of an untransformed

“republican principle” being extended to a new realm. In his identification of governance with the

(in his view) necessarily oligarchical structure of society, even worker self-governance is seen as

7 Carol Gould (1980).

8 Murray Bookchin (1982), Abdullah Öcalan (2015a, 2015b) Michael Knapp, Ercan Ayboga & Anja Flach (2016).

9 Sam Moyo & Paris Yeros (eds.) (2005), Michael Menser (2008), Hannah Wittman (2009), Wendy Wolford (2010),

Peter Andrée et al. (2014), Philip McMichael (2014), Amy Trauger (2014), Leandro Vergara-Camus (2014), Miguel

Carter (ed.) (2015).


26

a dangerous possibility, as something that might be “susceptible” of establishing a new form of

society.

Rancière’s disempowering dualism of dissensus is translated concretely in political life as

a kind of fatalism wherein political actors, insofar as they presuppose Rancière’s understanding of

politics, succumb to a belief that liberal democracy cannot be radically transformed. As Rancière

himself says of the emancipated person in The Ignorant Schoolmaster: “He knows what he can

expect of the social order [i.e., inequality and oligarchy] and will not make a big to-do about it”

(Rancière, 1991: 109). The emancipated person is the lucky fellow able to “scrupulously obey

superiors that he knows are his equal” (ibid). For Rancière, it seems to be enough that the oppressed

know they are equal in intelligence to their oppressors. These comments appear in a section of text

where Rancière argues that it is impossible to institutionalize the pedagogical method of Joseph

Jacotot (a method that was in fact concretely practiced by Jacotot and his followers in their

classrooms, and thus already institutionalized on a small scale).10 The practical presupposition of

their pedagogical method—the universal equality of intelligence of all human beings—serves as

the foundation of Rancière’s entire theoretical edifice. Though, Rancière insists that neither

Jacotot’s method nor its practical presupposition are capable of being instituted (Rancière 1991:

101-139). That is to say, Rancière asserts the necessity of the universal equality of intelligence,

but also asserts that this equality is necessarily immaterial, that it cannot be embodied in durable

institutions of education or of governance. Accompanied by this conviction is Rancière’s steadfast

refusal to consider institutional innovations that would move beyond the structures of liberal

democracy and global capitalism, his derisive attitude toward any theorists who speak about the

10 For a detailed look at Jacotot’s method as it was practiced during the 19th century at various educational institutions

across Europe, see John Tourrier’s Intellectual Emancipation: A Treatise on Jacotot’s Method of Universal Instruction

(1830 [reprinted by Scholar’s Choice Publisher in 2015]).


27

concrete possibilities of institutional transformation, and his insistence that all forms of governance

are necessarily dominated by an inegalitarian impulse. Rancière’s faith in the necessary status of

oligarchy and the necessarily immaterial status of equality do not inspire political action. To the

contrary, they inspire fatalism and encourage a surrender to the status quo. To the extent that

Rancière’s conceptual distinctions are gaining wide purchase across academic disciplines, the

emancipatory imagination is being considerably hemmed in within those fields of inquiry.

Rancière’s followers, after all, know what to expect from the police order, and they “will not make

a big to-do about it” (1991: 109).

Rancière’s Two Senses of Equality and the Reification of Liberalism

Although I have not thematized it above, Rancière constantly wavers between two forms

of equality which he describes as the presupposition or starting point of all political action. On the

one hand is the universal equality of intelligence, which I have discussed at length above. On the

other hand is the contingently inscribed forms of equality that are concretely leveraged in political

struggles; for instance, universal human rights inscribed in the foundational texts of modern

nation-states. He tends towards the former (ahistorical universal structure) when articulating his

theoretical form, most notably through his use/abuse of ancient exemplars. He tends towards the

latter (historically constituted universal) when filling in the structure of his theoretical scaffolding

with the empirical content of contemporary instances of politics, all of which seem to presuppose

the form of equality that is contingently inscribed in the founding texts of modern nation-states.

Rancière’s notion of an ahistorical equality inherent in the very structure of human

language is derived from his encounter with the texts of certain figures of the European

Enlightenment and anachronistically imposed upon his representation of Athens and Rome. When

representing the plebeians in Disagreement (1999), Rancière does not examine the extant record


28

of the historical struggle between the plebeians and patricians (a struggle that lasted centuries and

involved the ongoing construction of new institutions of governance through which the plebeians

achieved a formal institutional place that was fixed in the political order). Instead, Rancière offers

up Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s “rewriting of the tale told by Livy” (Rancière, 1999: 23). This

“rewriting” was published in 1829 under the heading of a “General formula of the history of all

peoples applied to the history of the Roman people” (ibid, italics added). Mimicking Ballanche

and his “general formula,” Rancière establishes his own universal theory, and then applies it to

ancient Athens, ancient Rome, and modern instances of political action. But these two moments—

the construction of a universal theory, followed by its application to particular cases—are occluded

from view by the style of “rewriting” history that Rancière adopts from Ballanche. Indeed, the

application of the theory to the particular case and the elaboration of the theory in general occur

simultaneously in the rewriting of particular histories, lending a sense of deep historical sensitivity

to a theory that is anything but.

This method asserts an astonishing uniformity in the form of political action from ancient

Athens to the present. As Rancière puts it: “What makes an action political is not its object or the

place where it is carried out, but solely its form” (Rancière, 1999: 32). This formalism inevitably

leads to distortions of the empirical content examined, which is made to conform to the theoretical

form that has been posited as an ahistorical universal. At least two negative effects follow. First,

and most obviously, Rancière’s theoretical framework necessarily ignores the vast diversity of

forms of protest, structures of governance, ways of life, and discourses of equality that have

contributed to the myriad instances in which political action has successfully transformed the

material conditions of human coexistence throughout history. Specifically, Rancière completely

excludes the work of institutional transformation from the scope of his inquiry; and in fact, he,


29

positively denigrates such work as necessarily subject to the inegalitarian logic of the police order.

Secondly, and perhaps more perniciously, given the fact that Rancière’s account of political action

is cast in ahistorical terms, at the level of form it is rendered incredibly rigid; when this rigid form

is filled in with empirical instances of politics that are overwhelmingly represented as mere appeals

to the abstract right of the bourgeois state, that empirical content is itself hypostatized as a

necessary, ahistorical universal, eliminating from view a path through which political action might

transform the liberal world order in the direction of a more egalitarian configuration.

This framework traps Rancière and his acolytes within a form of immanent critique that

presupposes bourgeois abstract right and merely seeks to extend the unmodified logic of this

republican principle to places and relations (e.g., the workshop described above) that have not yet

been touched by its wholesome goodness. What Rancière describes as the “syllogism of

emancipation” (Rancière, 1995: 45-52) and I am here describing as “immanent critique,” refers to

the activity of criticizing empirical reality from the perspective of the dominant norms present in

that reality, wherein the gap between the promises of the norm and the shortcomings of reality are

highlighted. In this case, the notion of “universal” equality—as codified in particular forms in the

founding texts and the juridical institutions of modern states—is taken as the concept that is

marshaled in a critique of material conditions. The gap between the formal promises of equality

and the concrete conditions that contradict those promises is thematized in the effort to ameliorate

the violations of the formal equality guaranteed by law.

This is the sense in which Rancière insists that politics is necessarily entangled with the

police, always acting “in the places and with the words that are common to both [the police order

and to political action], even if it means reshaping those places and changing the status of those

words” (Rancière, 1999: 33). This is certainly an effective form of political action that has achieved


30

many important victories for all manner of political actors. Nonetheless, the rigidity of Rancière’s

theoretical framework and the narrowness of its content prevent him from perceiving or imagining

political action that would transform either the prevailing political institutions or the form of

equality that would subsequently be presupposed in future practices of immanent critique.

Rancière’s account of politics ascribes to political actors the presupposition of two distinct

forms of equality: the contingent, empirically inscribed equality of the police order; and the

ontological, universal equality of the logos. Of course, it is unlikely that every political actor in all

of history consciously presupposed Rancière’s idiosyncratic account of the universal equality of

intelligence. Indeed, given Rancière’s view of language—which insists that each act of

understanding is a hermeneutic appropriation that singularly invests words with meaning from out

of the context of an entire life of experience—it is flatly impossible for the same concept of equality

to be consciously presupposed in every political action. If Rancière’s originary equality of the

logos is presupposed in every political action, it must be a pragmatic presupposition rather than a

conscious one. This pragmatic presupposition would be visible from the viewpoint of philosophy,

but would not be present to the consciousness of political actors who had not read Rancière’s texts.

Nonetheless, Rancière frequently ascribes his ontological equality as the conscious

presupposition of political actors throughout history. For instance, take his account of Blanqui, the

legendary revolutionary of 19th century France. When Blanqui is brought to trial in 1832, the

magistrate asks him to name his profession so that it can be inscribed in the court records. Blanqui

replies that he is a “proletarian.” When the magistrate objects to this response and asserts that this

is not a profession, Blanqui declares “It is the profession of thirty million Frenchmen who live off

their labor and who are deprived of political rights” (Rancière, 1999: 37). In reference to this

declaration, Rancière claims: “What is subjectified is neither work nor destitution, but the simple


31

counting of the uncounted, the difference between an inegalitarian distribution of social bodies

and the equality of speaking beings” (1999: 38). While this neatly fits Rancière’s theoretical

framework, wherein the equality of intelligence is lurking behind every speech act and waiting to

encounter the police order in dissensual glory, on Rancière’s own account Blanqui does not

reference the equality of intelligence. To the contrary, he contrasts the inegalitarian distribution of

bodies in the police order with that very police order’s own promise to equality: the proletarians

are “deprived of political rights” (ibid). It is the formally inscribed equality of citizens in respect

to political rights that is presupposed in Blanqui’s dissensual action, not Rancière’s ontological

equality. Thus, Blanqui’s action does match up with Rancière’s characterization of politics as

always entangled with the police and always borrowing the words and phrases that are already

inscribed in the police order. Why, then, does Rancière attribute the equality of speaking beings to

Blanqui in his “rewriting” of Blanqui’s political action?

Perhaps we can disentangle the intentionality of the political actors Rancière portrays from

the intentionality of the political theorist who Rancière in fact is. I contend that Rancière’s practice

of rewriting history from the point of view of his ontological equality reflects his will to lay his

own foundational fiction. The problem lies in the fact that Rancière’s dualistic ontology inculcates

the disempowering belief in: (1) the necessity of oligarchy and material inequality; and (2) the

necessarily immaterial nature of equality. These two theses on politics do not inspire action.


32

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Documents

Rancière’s Two Theses on Politics: The Disempowering